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Datalight offers expert consulting and software development services for reliable data management in embedded systems. Our code and documentation standards have been developed through decades of experience delivering industrial grade software solutions for use with leading embedded operating systems. You can count on Datalight to meet or beat your expectations for quality and on-time delivery.

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Developers who are ready for a FREE 30-day evaluation of Datalight embedded storage products Reliance or FlashFX Family products can start the process by e-mailing sales@datalight.com with your request.

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"Datalight Support has been extremely responsive, helpful, and proactive. It has been very refreshing to have this type of support from a vendor. My tasks revolve completely around working with third-parties and vendors. They are very professional, dedicated, and willing to go the extra mile to make sure the customers are happy."
-Dona Allen, Intel Software 3rd Party Manager, Intel Corporation

We are excited to announce that Datalight has been invited to present at the 2016 Embedded Systems Conference in Minneapolis, September 21-22. The session “Open Source and yet Secure” and “Avoiding the Brick – Seamless Updates in Embedded Devices,” will discuss best practices embedded engineers can employ to avoid challenges they face in producing long-lasting, high-quality products.

The idea for this paper came from a conversation our CEO, Roy Sherrill, had with several customers and industry folks regarding the decreasing endurance of flash memory. Some smaller lithography parts have program/erase cycles counted in the hundreds. What techniques can be used to make sure writes (and hence erases) are held to a minimum while still providing the level of performance and reliability that embedded devices require? He had some theories, but wanted proof.

As a partner of FreeRTOS in designing quality open source software for IoT, Datalight is excited for the recent release of FreeRTOS version 9.0.0. FreeRTOS V9 adds several features and improvements to the real-time operating system. Most significantly, FreeRTOS now supports completely statically allocated systems, giving developers precise control over the RAM footprint and even the memory locations of specific RTOS components (such as each individual task’s stack).

Raw flash memory, that is, memory that isn’t part of a package (like SD, eMMC, SSD, and the like) requires software to manage it. On Linux, this software is the Memory Technology Device (MTD) layer, with a flash file system above that to handle wear-leveling, bad block management, and all regular file system duties. There are several options for Linux, but some of them present advantages.

Embedded devices are used for many different purposes, in many different industries, and the expectations for lifetime range vastly between them. Small consumer products, such as wrist-mounted fitness monitors have lifetimes of only a few years as new versions will take their place shortly, whereas embedded devices in cars and energy meters may be expected to last upwards of 30 years. NAND flash wears out over time and will eventually fail. How can you extend the life of your NAND-based devices?

Recently, William Lamie published a mythbusting piece that examined the use of an RTOS in IoT devices on Electronic Design. His insightful comments apply to most device designs complex enough to use a microprocessor. Which, these days, is pretty much all of them. We’ve run into a lot of the same myths around one crucial component of the RTOS – the file system.

In the world of embedded computing, data-related failures are unfortunately part of being in business. Even with the right hardware, software and development, frustrating and costly failures can occur. But when issues do surface, many companies don’t possess the right tools to troubleshoot the challenges they run into.

We recently conducted a survey on the state of data security for embedded developers and the projects they are working on as a way to gauge the security concerns of the industry. We wanted to get developers’ opinions on everything related to embedded security, including how they are keeping data secure, if they foresee future projects requiring more security and which security risks they consider are the most important.

The theme of this year’s Embedded World show in Nuremberg, Germany (Feb. 23-25) is “We Are the Internet of Things” and we couldn’t be more excited to demonstrate how Datalight embodies this sentiment. We will once again be co-located with our partner Logic Technology in Hall 4, Stand 108, alongside some of the most innovative software and tools purveyors in the industry.

Union file systems are a creative solution to allow a virtual merge of multiple folders, while keeping their actual contents separate. The Overlay file system (OverlayFS) is one example of these, though it is more of a mounting mechanism than a file system.
Brought into the Linux kernel mainline with version 3.18, OverlayFS allows you to overlay the contents (both files and directories) of one directory onto another. The source directories can be on different volumes and can even be different file systems, which creates an interesting mechanism for allowing temporary modification of read-only files and folders.